Co-author Associate Professor Tan Nguan Soon from NTU's Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine said: "With current chemotherapy drug treatment, a common issue faced is that recurrent cancer becomes resistant to the drug. Our strategy does not involve the use of any pharmacological drugs but relies on the nanoparticles' unique properties to release catastrophic level of reactive oxygen species (ROS) to kill cancer cells."
Providing an independent view, Associate Professor Tan Ern Yu, a breast cancer specialist at Tan Tock Seng Hospital said, "This novel approach could hold much promise for cancer cells that have failed to respond to conventional treatment like chemotherapy. Such cancers often have evolved mechanisms of resistance to the drugs currently in use, rendering them ineffective. However, the cancer cells could potentially still be susceptible to the 'Trojan horse' approach since it acts through a completely different mechanism -- one that the cells will not have adapted to."
As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
The Lame Cherry advocates that President Donald Trump, embark upon another Manhattan Project for cancer, now that Jared Kushner has placed the mechanics into operation, and back an inovative treatment from Singapore to save real numbers of people who are infected with cancer.
A new experimental treatment reportedly tricks cancer cells into self-destructing, without the use of any drugs, providing new hope for winning the war on many different types of the disease.The treatment involves a nanoparticle coated in an amino acid called L-phenylalanine. The chemical is not naturally produced in the body but is instead absorbed from meat and dairy produce that humans consume.
L-phenylalanine is the perfect bait as it is one of the main amino acids cancer cells require to grow and spread throughout the human body, wreaking havoc in the process.
#NTUsg scientists have devised a ‘Trojan horse’ approach to kill #cancer cells without drugs by coating a nanoparticle with amino acid L-phenylalanine that causes cancerous cells to self-destruct. https://t.co/Q0CbhBVFrRpic.twitter.com/36EDsGXEk0
— NTU Singapore (@NTUsg) September 24, 2020The novel new treatment has proven incredibly successful on mice. The secret is the nanoparticle Nanoscopic phenylalanine Porous Amino Acid Mimic, or Nano-pPAAM for short.
Nano-pPAAM triggers overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) which causes a cascade effect inside the cancer cells, killing them while leaving surrounding, healthy cells unharmed.
“Against conventional wisdom, our approach involved using the nanomaterial as a drug instead [of] as a drug-carrier,” says material scientist Dalton Tay from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
They took a silica nanoparticle designated as 'Generally Recognized As Safe' by the US Food and Drug Administration and coated it with L-phenylalanine, and found that in lab tests with mice it killed cancer cells effectively and very specifically, by causing them to self-destruct.
The anti-cancer therapeutic nanoparticle is ultrasmall, with a diameter of 30 nanometres, or approximately 30,000 times smaller than a strand of human hair, and is named "Nanoscopic phenylalanine Porous Amino Acid Mimic," or Nano-pPAAM,
Further investigations showed that the amino acid coating of Nano-pPAAM helped the nanoparticle to enter the cancer cells through the amino acid transporter cell LAT1. Once inside the cancer cells, Nano-pPAAM stimulates excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS) production -- a type of reactive molecule in the body -- causing cancer cells to self-destruct while remaining harmless to the healthy cells.
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